2024 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

With the emergence of engineering education programs, there is at last a structure and approach to train engineering professors for the university and college levels. But engineering diversity administrators generally learn their job as they do it. The first women in engineering program was founded at Purdue in 1969, and programs for minority engineers or multicultural engineering in the 1970’s. The leaders of these programs come from a variety of backgrounds, including disciplinary engineering and higher education. But, to date, there is no program specifically designed to train engineering diversity program directors.
As a result, new program directors typically learn from reading what others have done in the literature, participating in groups like the National Association of Multicultural Engineering Program Advocates (NAMEPA) and Women in Engineering Pro-Active Network (WEPAN), and engaging in conferences like Collaborative Network for Engineering and Computing Diversity Conference (CONECD) and the American Society of Engineering Education annual conference (ASEE). In some instances, a new director may have the opportunity to learn from a previous director, or they may have been the product of such a program. In neither case, however, is it possible for new directors to understand and learn every aspect of planning and strategy. Even if the previous director desires to impart all that they know, it is possible that there is knowledge or meta-knowledge that they, themselves, are unaware they possess.
Another challenge is the lack of widespread understanding of the state of the art in diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging from a practitioner standpoint. The community exists in a state of functional dichotomy between those designated as researchers and practitioners. In addition, there are many members of the academic community who are not aware of either the current state of practice OR research. This disconnect frequently results in exhortations that reflect the past and ignore the progress that has been made to date.
This paper comprises a case study of a successful and long-standing Women and Minority Engineering Program from the perspective of the program director. It will discuss a theoretical framework for the components of a complete program and how the various pieces of the framework map to practice.